Impressive AI. Now open it in a jobsite trailer.
Kreo's AI takeoff is genuinely advanced — Auto Measure finds rooms and walls, the Caddie agent builds quantities on its own. It is also browser-only, online-only, and the AI you saw in the demo is the top tier of three.
Choose Kreo if you work at a desk with reliable internet and want the most autonomous AI takeoff on the market. Choose Groundwork Takeoff if you want AI on every seat rather than the top tier, a native Mac and Windows app that keeps working offline, and an AI that proposes a measurement for a human to verify rather than output you clean up afterwards.
| Checked September 20, 2026 | Groundwork Takeoff | Kreo 2D Takeoff |
|---|---|---|
| Price, per seat, per year — checked September 20, 2026 | ||
| What the vendor publishes | $590 a year or $59 a month, every feature on it | Lite $35 · Plus $70 · Pro $175 per user/mo billed annually |
| Cheapest tier that does what one Groundwork seat does | $590 — there is only one tier | $2,100 — Pro — the tier that unlocks AI takeoff |
| Volume discount | 3+ seats −15%, 5+ seats −25%, applied at checkout | Not published on the vendor's pricing page |
| Perpetual license | $2,500 once, first year of updates included; $295/yr after that gates new versions, never access | Subscription only |
| AI takeoff included | Every seat, including trial seats | AI measurement is Pro ($175/user/mo) only |
| Native Mac app | Apple silicon and Intel | Browser only |
| Platforms | ||
| Native desktop app | Mac and Windows | Browser only |
| iPad | Home-screen app, Pencil markup | No |
| Works offline | Offline-first, 14-day grace period | A cloud connection is required |
| Takeoff & estimating | ||
| Measuring tools | 6 measuring tools — Linear, Segment, Perimeter, Area, Volume, Count | Manual measurement from Plus; the automatic tools are Pro only |
| How the AI behaves | Suggests a measurement; a human verifies before it commits | Autonomous — Auto Measure 2.0 and the Caddie agent |
| Assemblies and reports | Library, builder, live estimate grid | Assemblies database and Excel-like reports |
| Where Kreo is ahead | ||
| Autonomy of the AI | Deliberately a suggestion, not an answer | The most autonomous takeoff AI on the market |
| Free guest seats | Every seat is a paid seat | Unlimited free guests |
Competitor figures are read off that vendor's own pricing page on September 20, 2026; the sources are listed at the foot of this page. A vendor who publishes no price gets no number here — the empty cell is the finding.
$1,510 per seat, per year. That is Kreo's cheapest comparable tier — Pro — the tier that unlocks AI takeoff at $2,100 — less a Groundwork annual seat at $590. Not against their entry tier: against the cheapest tier that does what one Groundwork seat does.
Which tier the demo was
Kreo publishes three tiers per user per month on annual billing: Lite, Plus and Pro. Lite is collaboration. Plus is manual measurement. The AI — Auto Measure, One-Click Area, Auto Count — is Pro, and Pro is roughly five times the price of Lite.
That is the number to carry into the conversation, because the demo is always Pro. If you priced the product from the tier table and budgeted the middle one, you budgeted for manual measurement.
Autonomous, versus verified
Kreo's AI aims to do the takeoff. Groundwork's aims to do the boring half of it and hand the result back for approval. That is a real design disagreement and reasonable people land on either side of it — but it changes where the work goes. Reviewers report that Kreo's automatic measurement is fast and that organizing the output into something a bid can use is still on them; there are verified reviews describing exactly that, and describing the gap between measured quantities and the materials you actually have to buy.
Groundwork's answer to that gap is assemblies and a formula evaluator: the quantity becomes material, labor and waste as it commits, rather than in a spreadsheet afterwards.
Users have also reported that the AI struggles on scanned drawings, which is worth knowing if your addenda arrive as photocopies. Groundwork measures any sheet you have calibrated, and runs OCR on scans on the way in.
Kreo's AI is the most autonomous in the category, full stop
Auto Measure 2.0 finds rooms, doors, windows and wall finishes on clean vector plans. Caddie has grown into a genuine in-app agent that plans tasks, builds quantities and generates reports, and the Skills playbooks let a team script AI workflows without writing code. Their support is praised for sub-hour responses and the unlimited free guest seats are more generous than anything we offer. If you are a high-volume estimator at a desk with fiber and clean CAD-exported PDFs, Kreo Pro is a legitimate choice.
Sources
Tier prices and which tier unlocks the automatic measurement tools: kreo.net/pricing, read September 20, 2026 — Lite, Plus and Pro are published per user per month on annual billing, and Enterprise is quote-only. Review observations on post-processing and on scanned drawings are from verified Capterra and Trustpilot reviews of Kreo 2D Takeoff. Kreo's own accuracy and speed figures are vendor claims with no independent benchmark published, and are not repeated as fact here.
Kreo® is a trademark of Kreo. Check current details with the vendor.
Check it against your own set.
The fastest way to settle a comparison page is to open your own plans in both. Ours takes a week and no card.